I'd known the people at Rolling Stone for a while. I'd gone to them with a piece I'd done on Beirut for Vanity Fair that Vanity Fair didn't want to publish, because they said I was making fun of death... This was Tina Brown.But they paid me for it. So I've got this big chunk of a piece, and Rolling Stone liked it, but they thought it was a little dated. But then they called me back and asked me to do a similar piece about the Turks and Caicos Islands, where the whole government had been arrested for dope smuggling. That was fun.

Writing this book required an enormous amount of help from friends. To them goes the credit. I'll take the money.

I've been a New Yorker for ten years, and the only people who are nice to us turn out to be Moonies.

Idealism is based on big ideas. And, as anybody who has ever been asked "What's the big idea?" knows, most big ideas are bad ones.

Don't send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals when their cheery effect is needed.

Never steal anything so small that you'll have to go to an unpleasant city jail for it instead of a minimum-security federal tennis prison.

I realised the bohemian life was not for me. I would look around at my friends, living like starving artists, and wonder, 'Where's the art?' They weren't doing anything. And there was so much interesting stuff to do, so much fun to be had... maybe I could even quit renting.